Spotify For Artist Fan Study - Everything You Need To Know

Spotify for Artists has never failed to act as nothing short of a godsend for musicians, and now the music streaming platform has come out with Fan Study - a microsite with 15 new and unintuitive data-driven insights into the listening patterns of its users all around the world. As per Spotify, this will help artists improve their Spotify numbers, merch sales, and help musicians improve their overall music marketing campaign. 

The data presented on the microsite of Spotify for Artists is accompanied by interactive insights and actions you can take to improve your reach. Fan Study has been organized into four parts, namely - Reach, Engagement, Release, and Merch. According to Spotify, These insights are helpful for all members of the music community, including managers, marketers, and artist-label executives. 

Let’s dive deeper into some of the key features of Fan Study and how they might benefit indie musicians.

Listener Reach

The data in Fan Study in Spotify for Artists shows surprising places where people are more likely to discover new music. For example, according to the data, most kinds of new music are discovered in Latin America. The list included names like Sao Paolo, Santiago, Mexico City, Los Angeles, and London in the top five. You can see your music reach in specific cities using this data and then target your music to those cities, which will help you evolve your fan base.

Another thing that the data shows is what other genre of music your listeners like to listen to. For example, 53% of metal fans follow Hip Hop artists, according to the data given on Fan Study by Spotify. This kind of data can be helpful in getting an idea of the kind of artists it might be a good idea to collaborate with. Today, music fans prefer not to limit themselves to a single genre and are open to listening to different kinds of sounds produced by different kinds of artists. They have also made it possible for you to tag your new tracks with more than one genre when you are pitching them for playlists.

Since we are talking about reach, it is also important to mention that Spotify data also shows many unexpected apps and places that are sending your new subscribers to Spotify. According to Spotify, 100K listeners were added to Spotify from Discord, who listened to almost 9 million tracks in only 14 days. Artists interact with fans on different apps, which funnels them to follow their music on Spotify. This means that you, as an indie musician, need to develop and increase your presence on different social media apps to increase your Spotify Monthly Listeners and to create a strong fanbase.

 

Engagement by Listeners

The data in Fan Study points out that listeners who saved an artist’s track, listened to it three times more than average even after six months of saving it. When a user saves your track, it means that they have a strong intent to keep on listening to your song. There are various tools in Spotify for Artists by which artists can increase their active listeners by using Canvas, Marquee, or recording a Music + Talk Show giving commentary on their own music. Apart from these tools, you should try to encourage your fans that make up your Spotify Monthly Listeners to listen to your music and save it in their libraries when it is released. 

Your superfans drive a huge amount of your streams on Spotify. According to the data given on Fan Study by Spotify, the top 5% of your fans listen to your music six times more than the rest of your listeners. This means it is important for you to keep engaging with your super fans by taking the help of various tools provided by Spotify for Artists.

It was also shown in the data, that once a listener adds your music to a playlist, they will listen to you 41% more and look at your profile 12% more than average. They are also 60% more likely to purchase your merch. 

Release Strategies

 

Even though a massive spike is seen on Spotify on the day of release, Fan Study data shows that 53% of songs peak after more than seven days of their release. To increase your fan base and to make sure that your listeners keep listening to your music, you should design your release strategy in a way that goes beyond just the first week of release. Promote your music as much as you can on different social media platforms and have a solid post-release strategy in place to make sure that your fan engagement is sustained for a longer time. 

Another interesting thing shown by the data on Fan Study was that when you release a new song, the streams of your old songs see a rise of 15-20%. To take advantage of this, use the release week to attract listeners to your old songs as well. This can be done by using tools provided by Spotify, such as Canvas. Updating or adding a Canvas to your music has shown to increase shares on that track by 10.7%.

Merch Sales

According to insights on Fan Study, vinyl is the most selling merch in five out of the seven genres studied. But this is just a general insight on the merch trends on Spotify. To learn what your Spotify Monthly Listeners may be interested in buying, Spotify for Artists will provide you with age demographics and genre studies for you to plan out your merch accordingly. 

Another interesting thing noticed in the given data is that the number of your listeners do not necessarily affect your merch sales. According to Spotify, new artists often outsell the biggest names in the game when it comes to selling merch. 

Spotify has been doing innovative work in making music accessible to everyone and to make it easier for new and young artists to show their work to everyone. This new study is another step towards this endeavour. All of the things mentioned above are mostly general, but Spotify for Artists will provide you with tools and analytics based on the work that will help you personalise your music and increase your reach. You can access Spotify’s Fan Study microsite here.